We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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George Walden, the former Conservative education minister, Foreign Office mandarin and now a writer on various affairs, makes the claim that the Tories may have a hunger for office but lack a clear idea of what they would do. That is true up to a point; but I think it has already become pretty obvious that Cameron’s Conservatives are a pretty centrist lot, with no great obvious desire to shrink the state, reverse the enormous burdens of regulations and tax, or to roll back the intrusive legislation that has robbed owners of private property, be they homes or businesses, of many freedoms to dispose of their property as they see fit even with the consent of their fellows. And when I consider some of Walden’s advice, I wonder what would be gained by taking it:
The luxury of Opposition, meanwhile, has rarely been so alluring. If ever there were an ideal moment not to be in government, it is now. Either you grapple endlessly with unrewarding tasks (gérer la grisaille, or managing greyness, as a Frenchman has put it) or you are on your knees praying that sub-prime mortgage failures in America do not dynamite the economy, or find yourself disarmed in the face of environmental or terrorist threats. At such moments, Opposition is the place to be. The insouciance it can bring can be seen in Tory suggestions that the Government should have had arks in waiting for the floods, or in the cynical denial of the need for identity cards or longer detention for terrorist suspects. Thank God it’s not us in charge, the subtext runs, otherwise we would have had to do both.
Consider “the cynical denial of the need for identity cards or longer detention for terrorist suspects”. Oh really, George? If it is “cynical” for the Tories to deny that we “need” ID cards that proved useless in preventing terror bombings in countries like Spain, where people have ID cards, then the more cynicism, the better. And if it is “cynical” for the Tories to show occasional flashes of respect for the English Common Law, and the web of checks and balances that this legal order contains, then I say “well done Mr Cameron” – a rarity from yours truly.
Here is some other advice from Walden, of equally dubious quality:
Conservatives, like Labour, have backed away from a fundamental rethink of our centrally maladministered, Stalinist National Health Service. Nor has either party the courage to tackle the divide between public and private education which, by severing the head from the body, kills the possibility of a high-quality state sector stone dead. City academies, a refuge from this reality endorsed by both parties, will make no difference. The notion that an absurdly fragmented railway system can ever work in our horribly over-populated island is another joint pretence. So the question is simple: if the Tories have no serious policies to offer, and share the Government’s problem-dodging instincts, what is the point of office?
Apart from agreeing with his description of the NHS, I accept little else. Walden skirts around the fact that the NHS is a monopoly funded out of general taxation, is mostly free at the point of use; there is little serious competition from the private sector (although this is slowly growing) and therefore there is little incentive either for people to arrange their own health affairs more intelligently or for health providers to cater more carefully for what people want. (And in case anyone raises the case of the US health system to bash private medicine, I should point out that the US system is so warped by litigation risk, regulation and restrictive practices that it is hardly a model of laissez faire). Walden then goes on about the supposed evil divide between state and private education and wants to blur this: does this mean that independent schools lose their independence, which is precisely why they appeal to parents and pupils in the first place? What would Walden say about the constant desire of governments to raise the school-leaving age, creating a new grouping of bored and disruptive students? Does Walden not realise that the way to improve education is to inject a sharp dose of competition and parental/pupil choice across the board, through a voucher system or tax-deduction approach? On the contrary, Walden wants the Tories to make the state even more dominant in education, it seems.
The Tories are getting lots of advice these days. I doubt any Tories spend a lot of time reading this blog but for any that do, the best advice I could give them is to advocate policies that expand the liberty of the individual and get the state out of our lives. Period. All else is blather, even if it comes from supposedly clever people called George Walden.
One of the problems of living such a busy work life is falling behind on reading books that have been around for a while. I finally have managed to complete “Project Orion” by George Dyson, the son of the famed scientist and writer, Freeman Dyson. The book recounts the story of how various US government agencies and some private contractors got together in the late 1950s and early 1960s – the project was finally halted in 1965 – to develop a rocket that would be launched by firing nuclear bombs underneath it. The basic idea was that you could put a seriously large rocket into space and fly it major distances – such as to Mars – by firing a nuke underneath the rocket, and use the force of the blast to push against a plate underneath the craft. By using this method, craft could travel far further than using the liquid fuel rockets developed at the time by the likes of von Braun and other engineers. There is a lot of complex engineering and scientific material in this book, which may send the head of a non-scientist spinning, but after working through this book, I get the strong impression that there is no insuperable obstacle to the technology actually working, although there seem to be practical issues such as how to avoid nuclear fallout problems near launch sites and how to avoid areas becoming seriously contaminated. Even so, we may hear again of nuclear rockets, although to assuage fears, I reckon they will be called plasma rockets instead.
Several things struck me about the period in the late 50s and early 60s when this project operated. First, the race by the US to beat the Soviets in space clearly was a massive impulse for technical and engineering advance, but it also sucked vast amounts of taxpayers’ money into a variety of projects, many of which came to nought. The book raises the old issue of whether military/other competition between states does generate significant new knowledge that would not otherwise be generated (I remain unconvinced). Second, there was a remarkably tolerant attitude among the public – at least until the mid-60s – towards big scientific projects of all kinds, including nuclear power. These space projects were cool. This was the age, after all, of Alan Shepherd, John Glenn and Chuck Yeager. All of these men were heroes in the media as well as renowned in their own profession. Nowadays, it is a different story, although as Dale Amon of this site regularly reminds us, a tremendous amount of good work is going on to promote commercial spacefaring. Even so, in the time when the rocket was being developed, the environmentalist lobby that has done so much to lobby for restrictions in certain areas was hardly visible on the radar. Reading about the scale and number of nuclear tests in the Pacific or in the western US desert, for example, reminds me of how long ago the 1950s are in some ways.
A final thought about this excellent book: it demonstrates how the US federal government and its agencies developed a huge and sprawling bureaucracy to run different space projects. At times, I found it hard to follow the ins and outs of all the various acronyms representing different agencies of government as the scientists and adventurers begged and campaigned for funding. After a while, I started to drown in alphabet soup. After reading this remarkable book, I am more convinced than ever that when space flight technologies really do take off, they must do so as far away from the maw of the State as possible.
And on that final note, here is an author I really recommend.
I may not like utilitarianism, but I would suggest it is wrong rather than “outdated”. Roy Hattersley wants to keep utilitarianism but scrap, as for some (unclear) reason no longer applying, the constraint Mill put on the doctrine of respect for individual freedom.
Here he is in The Guardian on Monday:
Mill’s libertarian philosophy is based on two precepts that – despite having written an admirable essay on women’s rights – he always expressed with the use of male pronouns. The first principle asserts that “all errors which (a man) is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good”. Only cranks believe that now. If it were a generally held view, we would not prohibit the use of recreational drugs or require passengers in the back seats of motor cars to wear safety belts. […]
Mill’s second precept makes a distinction between “the part of a person’s life which concerns only himself and that which concerns others”. In short, we are free to damage ourselves but are not at liberty to behave in a way that harms other people. The distinction was easier to make in Victorian Britain than it is today – though even in 1859, when On Liberty was written, subscribers to the cult of the individual grossly underestimated how much one human is dependent on another.
Gawd! I never thought to find myself inwardly nodding at that trite radical saw about it taking cranks to start a revolution. ‘Do what I say, because I say it is good for you.’ This is the creed of slavery.
In fact, in 1859, the year of On Liberty, the following appeared in The Spectator:
The intelligent, christian slave-holder at the South is the best friend of the negro. He does not regard his bonds-men as mere chattel property, but as human beings to whom he owes duties. While the Northern Pharisee will not permit a negro to ride on the city railroads, Southern gentlemen and ladies are seen every day, side by side, in cars and coaches, with their faithful servants. Here the honest black man is not only protected by the laws and public sentiment, but he is respected by the community as truly as if his skin were white. Here there are ties of genuine friendship and affection between whites and blacks, leading to an interchange of all the comities of life. The slave nurses his master in sickness, and sheds tears of genuine sorrow at his grave. When sick himself, or overtaken by the infirmity of age, he is kindly cared for, and when he dies the whites grieve, not for the loss of so much property, but for the death of a member of the family.–This is the relation which slaves generally, and domestic servants universally, sustain to their white masters.
There is a vast deal of foolish talk about the delights of freedom and the hardships of slavery. In one sense no one, white or black, is free in this world. The master orders his slave to work in a certain field, when he perhaps would prefer to go elsewhere–this is slavery. But is the master free to do as he pleases! Not so.–He is driven by as stern a necessity to labor with his hands or confine himself to business, as the slave ever feels.
Protected by laws and public sentiment. Respected by the community. Why should self-deternination be relevant, when we have modernisation? And unlimited public sentiment.
As people involved in this blog know I am not exactly shy about attacking Conservative party policy either nationally or locally. So it is only fair that I present good news when there is some.
The other night the MP for Kettering, Mr Philip Hollobone, was formally readopted as the Prospective Conservative Party candidate for election as member of the House of Commons for Kettering.
Why is this “good news” or a “reason to proud”?
Because of what he said.
Mr Hollobone informed the score or so people who had come for the meeting of the Executive Council, of the local Conservative Association, that he believed that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland should leave the European Union – and that he had said this publicly and would continue to do so (which is why I can mention it here) whatever Mr Cameron thought about this matter (although, in the interests of fairness, I must make clear that Mr Cameron has not said that a person may not hold this opinion).
Mr Hollobone then left the room and a secret ballot was held. It is a rule that numbers can not be given. However, in this case they are not needed – as there were no spoilt ballot papers and no opposing votes (work it out).
Both good news and a reason to be proud.
By the way, in case anyone thinks I had something to do with any of the above, I did not say a word in the entire Executive Council meeting. As the meeting was not public I will not mention what other people said. However, there were no comments opposing Mr Hollobone’s position.
Lately it seems that hardly a week goes by that we do not get some new chilling preview of the Police State that many in the political class are trying to bring about . How about this one?
Tens of thousands of people who have failed to pay court fines amounting to more than £487m would be banned from leaving the country under new powers outlined by the Home Office. Ministers are also looking at ways of using the new £1.2bn “e-borders” programme to collect more than £9m owed in health treatment charges by foreign nationals who have left the country without paying.
The programme, to be phased in from October next year, will also allow the creation of a centralised “no-fly” list of air-rage or disruptive passengers which can be circulated to airlines. The e-borders programme requires airlines and ferry companies to submit up to 50 items of data on each passenger between 24 and 48 hours before departure to and from the UK. With 200 million passenger movements in and out of the UK last year to and from 266 overseas airports on 169 airlines, an enormous amount of data is expected to be generated by the programme.
Of course as the government freely admits, it will use this to monitor everyone’s movements for all manner of purposes beyond “air-rage” or people using the NHS. I can only imagine how quickly the list of thing that will get you stopped at the border is going to grow. Sorry, you have an appointment with a ‘social’ worker next week and we need to make sure you turn up. Failed to put your recycling out? BBC tax not paid yet? Outstanding parking tickets? Your carbon ration has been used up? Your kiddies refusing to attend the local educational conscription centre?
You think I am joking?
9/11 was blowback. It was blowback for the USA making movies featuring nudity. It was blowback for rock and roll and Jack Daniels and hog-roasts and pornography and Marilyn Monroe and Baywatch. It was blowback for not being part of a caliphate. Mohammed Atta was an architect(!) and what really wound him up was that in his native Cairo the Hilton Hotel and the Bank of America towered over the medieval mosques. Oh Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine always gets dragged up as a “legitimate” grievance but that’s pure window dressing. Why has no Arab state done a bloody thing to aid the Palestinians? And by the way, my definition of “aid” does not include bunging $25000 to the family of a “martyr” who has blown up in a Pizza Hut. The PA has basically been bank-rolled by the EU and oddly enough not in fact by their fellow Arabs and brothers in Islam of the Arab League. Why do you think the oil sheiks didn’t pony up the dough?
– Regular commenter Nick M in this thread.
And not just for other people, which is the usual way of things:
I am responsible. I think. I care. I hold myself back from all sorts of desires and wishes which are impulsive, brought on by the clamour and disturbance of this corrupt over-materialistic world we live in, separated from nature and in intense competition with each other. We live in a sick society which is not going to cure itself. Like small children, we need forcibly calming down, we need to be held to account, we need to ‘learn’.
You may find this deeply disturbing as a view. But then, I’m not romantic about our so-called ‘liberties’ as Henry Porter is. I’m not a sentimentalist about old-style ‘freedoms’.
A commentator on Henry Porter’s article Each DNA swab brings us closer to a police state on the Observer website. Depressingly much more where that came from.
The neo-puritans hate their own desires and the possibility of choosing between them. They think surveillance is good because ‘if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear’, and they know you need watching in case you might do something wrong. They have bad impulses too, which by awful effort they control. The total control of the state – conceived as an undesiring arbiter of good – can relieve us of the burden of choice and keep us working for the good of society. It will free us from fear; because the freedom of bad people, who might be anyone, is what we have most to fear.
Putin’s Russia continues its heroic great march backwards in time. The ‘weaponization of psychiatry‘ is something that never went out of style in China, where people can be described as ‘politically deranged’. The use of psychiatric detention against political enemies has a long history in the not-so-post Communist world and so I can hardly say I am surprised to see this being done again in Russia.
Contrary to what people might sometimes suppose “ought” to be the case at a blog like this, I have never felt that I have been under some sort of pressure, imposed either by myself or the editors, to write solely about politics or Big World Affairs. Yes, of course, we bash the various statist intrusions, the general crapness of David Cameron, Green reactionaries, islamofascists, privacy-trashing New Labour politicians, etc, etc, but of course we also write regularly about science, spacefaring and so on. And as regulars will know, I often mention fillms or films that have become part of the public conversation. My last comment about so-called “art house” films drew from one, perfectly polite commenter the remark that “why cannot I write about something important?”.
I think films are important, because they are part of culture, and, whether we like or not, the contents of a film, just like a painting, piece of sculpture, novel, ballad or poetry can sometimes – not always – say something interesting about the sort of values that permeate a society. To borrow from Ayn Rand for a moment, art can reveal the philosophy, world view, or “sense of life”, of the person who made that book, film or picture. (A person who prefers to listen to atonal music may have a different psychology or outlook to someone who likes rock n’ roll, for example). The artist may not himself be aware of that philosophy or be able to articulate it clearly, but it exists. In the case of arthouse films, for example, particularly of the sort that were produced by the Europeans like Bergman, Traffaut and Godard, they they certainly did tell us something about the state of the culture at the time: anti-bourgoios, anti-heroic, not very interested sometimes in actual drama, sharply defined characters or plots; the tone was often ironic (sometimes very funny), amused, but also very dark at times. The films fitted into the intellectual world of the time, to a world still recovering from the long-dominant strains of socialism and collectivism in vogue for much of the 20th Century. There are exceptions and oddities to this sweeping statement of mine, of course, but as a generalisation, I think it holds a fair amount of water.
On one level, arthouse films can and are enjoyed for being quite entertaining, even brilliant (I might rent out Bergman’s the Seventh Seal to see if it as good as the commenters say) but the reason why I chose to write what I did was because I agree with the likes of Toby Young and even Jeremy “The Rottweiler” Paxman that a lot of what passes for great art from such film directors is pretty thin gruel indeed. Art is important, because it says something about the civilisation in which we happen to live, often far more so than any number of books in a library.
Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day and say: I’m free to think and to speak.
– Actor Jimmy Stewart
Earlier this evening I was reading the on-line Telegraph and clicked on a link about a Taliban leader being killed in a NATO air strike in what I assumed was going to be Afghanistan… and to my surprise I ended up at an article about the interminable queues at British airports! So this NATO air strike against the Taliban was where exactly?
I looked again a bit later and the links were appropriately sorted out but as someone who has just passed through the nightmare that is Heathrow, for one glorious moment I thought some public spirited member of the armed forces stuck in one of what Adriana calls “the security theatre queues” had snapped and called in a long over due air strike on Terminal 2.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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